ORIGINAL ARTICLE: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/03/here-s-how-startups-will-shape-latin-america-s-future/

What do the 163 million young people in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) think about their future? According to a recent World Economic Forum survey, the region’s 15-29 year-olds – who represent one quarter of its total population – are worried about climate change, ranking it as the most serious global challenge they face.

At a regional level, they also identified the following significant issues in their own countries:

Image: World Economic Forum

However, they are optimistic about the power of business and technology to change their countries for the better. For example, 46% ranked a “startup ecosystem and entrepreneurship” as the most important factor contributing to youth empowerment in a country.

So can a start-up ecosystem really take on the most serious challenges identified by LAC’s youth today, such as lack of transparency or education?

One useful indicator is the 50 “outstanding startups” selected by the World Economic Forum and the International Finance Corporation. By comparing the issues identified in the survey mentioned above with the focus of these start-ups, we can extrapolate insights into what entrepreneurs see as future areas of growth, and how they are taking on regional challenges using innovative technology and entrepreneurship.

Transparency and security in the palm of your hand

Let’s begin with the issues of transparency and security, ranked as the first and third most important issues by youth in LAC.

Inspired by on-demand ridesharing companies or navigation apps developed in the US, such as Lyft or Uber, young Latin American entrepreneurs are creating new services with features tailored to their environment.

While Uber is popular in Latin America, with an even greater reach among mobile users in Brazil and Mexico than in the US (see chart below), homegrown companies are developing unique capabilities to address local needs.

Uber % reach among mobile users (with selected competitors).

Image: Comscore, August 2017

Whereas the American rideshare companies primarily focused on convenient and affordable mobility, their Latin American counterparts are grappling with distinct transparency and security issues which affect everyone, from residents wanting to navigate their city safely at night, to businesses requiring a secure supply chain.

In the 50 start-ups featured in the Forum’s list and beyond, innovators are responding to the need for localized and transparent information to plan their daily journeys.

For example, Base Operations aggregates information from several sources, including “government statistics, crowdsourced reports, and social media” to provide users with real-time, actionable information to help them stay safe. It is to crime awareness what Waze is to navigation, but with enhanced functionality, offering routing, tailored alerts, and group location sharing.

In some cases, environmental sustainability and social impact are integrated into the business model.

Take, for example, the Brazilian start-up Zumpy, created to reduce the number of vehicles on the road and improve air quality. Users can apply safety filters to plan rides with Facebook friends, or specially moderated groups for their universities or companies. At the end of a journey in a car full of passengers travelling along a compatible route, the app produces an estimate of reduced CO² emissions.

Infrastructure for education

More users will benefit from these innovations in mobility, transparency and security if mobile broadband access continues to grow in LAC. This growth can also drive changes in the second most serious issue identified by the survey: education.

Internet access is crucial not just for access to educational resources, but also for youth empowerment, as the survey shows:

Image: World Economic Forum

The important point here is not just internet penetration in LAC (now around 66%), but also access to mobile broadband connections, which soared from 7% to 58% of the population between 2010 and 2015.

As many learners use educational technology through their phones, and many budding entrepreneurs seek access to capital via e-banking services, the region must overcome geographic and socioeconomic disparities in mobile broadband provision.

If these disparities can be reduced, the possibilities for educational enhancement are exciting.

The dynamic growth of Latin America’s educational start-ups has been apparent even in the short time since 2015, when I wrote about the increasing demand for online learning resources. At that time, courses were still predominantly anglo-centric, and quality was variable.

Similar to the pattern we see in Latin American mobility apps, regional variations on US models are heralding major advances for educational technology. While Latin America is the fastest growing region for an American company like Coursera, it is not the leading company in this space.

Today, LAC’s largest open online course provider – MiríadaX – is tailored for Ibero-American learners, and now provides over 300 courses from 90 university partners in Spanish or Portuguese.

As such, it’s no surprise to see new, more specialized educational technology start-ups on the Forum’s list, such as Lab4U in Chile (an app for science education to aid teachers and engage students) and EduK in Brazil (a provider of online courses, especially for small business entrepreneurs).

However, to foster the next generation of entrepreneurs, access to secondary education should also be a priority, particularly outside major cities. Progress has been made in secondary education completion in rural areas, yet “close to 60% of both young men and women in rural areas do not complete secondary school”.

Economic opportunity and gender equality

Finally, how are Latin American entrepreneurs addressing the fourth most serious issue – a lack of employment and economic opportunity, through efforts to achieve gender equality?

We know that firms with greater gender equality are more innovative and successful. However, female entrepreneurs in LAC tend to have “lower confidence in their own abilities, coupled with higher fear of failure rates” according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor.

While supporting a start-up ecosystem, we should not be overly reliant on technological solutions to inequalities in economic opportunity.

In Brazil, civil society projects like that in Varzea Nova – which attempt a holistic approach to educational and internet access, health services and vocational training – ensure that communities are not dependent on technology alone as a tool for sustainable growth.

In conclusion, the range of challenges addressed by new start-ups offers us a glimpse of Latin America’s future. This vision will be defined by local innovation in mobility, clean energy, education, online lending, banking and logistics.

It’s clear that innovation, transparency, gender equality and equitable access to a high quality education all impact the competitiveness of the region’s economies, and homegrown start-ups are starting to address those issues directly.

A strong start-up ecosystem, which is what young people want, has the opportunity to flourish if governments, private enterprise and civil society all attend to these underlying structural and social challenges identified by Latin America’s new crop of innovators.

Duty of Care Challenges

Will Wolfe

Whether you are aware of it or not, your employer has a duty of care to you and your coworkers.

Whenever you are at the office or traveling on official business, your employer is obligated to take reasonable measures to ensure you remain safe, or at least help you mitigate the expected risks. At your home office, this might mean security-locked doors, posted guards, and emergency response plans. The provision of care while traveling, however, can be a much more dynamic problem, one that the security industry is currently ill-equipped to solve. As businesses globalize and employees travel to new regions, some with high crime rates, a new approach is needed to address these challenges.

According to top security managers, apathy is the greatest obstacles to their duty of care. It is difficult for business travelers to digest security-related information, even though it could prevent them from walking down the wrong street or falling prey to a new con. From the perspective of someone who has sat through countless safety and security briefings, it’s not that people don’t care about their own well-being. Rather, apathy stems from how tough it is to translate and absorb security information into something relatable or actionable. A traveler with a slew of competing concerns (travel itineraries, project deadlines, family requirements, etc) is near overload. Expecting this traveler to grasp the destination’s regional disputes, learn historical and new criminal modus operandi, and memorize a risk map after a long briefing in the middle of the workday is unreasonable. Even veteran travelers with many briefings under their belts tune out, either due to boredom from repeated or superfluous information or to complacency resulting from numerous trips without incident. Essentially, travelers are either receiving the wrong information or getting it at the wrong time.

Another issue is the dynamic nature of crime; it doesn’t just stay put. Yes, in many cities there are areas that have been, and probably will remain, dangerous. Avoiding these areas is a practical step that travelers should take. However, crime doesn’t abide by the dotted lines and color codes drawn by security consulting firms. As criminals commit opportunistic crime, they shift to new locations, try new tactics, and target different groups. The security industry is simply ill-equipped to handle this dynamism, and employees assume greater risk because of it.

Only recently has the security industry begun to leverage advances in technology. However, it seems to be limited to supply chain security or crisis management. Tools designed for professionals in Security Operations Centers focus on providing communication and accountability during major events such as natural disasters, terrorist incidents, active shooters. For travelers navigating new cities and avoiding opportunistic crime, the available tools are woefully lacking. Employees rely on static reports, high-level and text-based incident feeds, or “panic-button” apps which yield a false sense of action.

None of the existing tools have the user-centric design we see in our favorite apps, nor do they leverage technology’s growing capability to aggregate and visualize complex sources of data. The Base Operations team is working to rectify this by helping residents and business travelers alike receive the right information at the right time, empowering them to make safer decisions.

Why Does Crime Happen Where it Does?

Cory Siskind

Looking at a crime heat map can seem nonsensical. Why there? What is it about any particular neighborhood that generates more or less crime? In some cities, crime always seems to be concentrated in the same areas. In others, mostly developing market cities, the map is shifting all the time. What’s going on?

Scholars and academics have lengthy answers. At Base Operations, we think about how two kinds of crime affect the map:

1. Opportunistic Crime

These are crimes that happen because the opportunity arises. Factors that encourage or discourage opportunistic crime include city infrastructure, police presence, time of day, special events, and neighborhood demographics. In Mexico City, for example, there is a neighborhood called Observatorio. It has a crowded bus and metro depot, fancy cars that pass through on their way to the wealthy Lomas neighborhood, and a location that sits neatly between several thoroughfares. Unfortunately for its residents, visitors, and close friends of the Base Operations team, that makes it prime real estate for carjacking.

A common misconception is that crime levels are aligned with socio-economic status. More often than not, this is an oversimplification. A quiet middle class neighborhood like Navarte, for example, has much less crime than trendy and touristy Roma or Condesa. Many known factors combine to make a location an opportunistic crime hotspot.

2. Organized Crime

Organized crime impacts the map in a totally different way. Think about how a city government divides up the map. There are municipalities, important routes, and police officers in charge of different segments of the city. In some cities, you can draw a similar map for organized crime. Gangs or cartels control certain territories where they claim the right to pursue nefarious activities in a competition free environment.

Depending on the frequency of activities like drug dealing, extortion, or kidnapping, an area under a gang or cartel’s control might experience higher crime rates. The real surge in crime rates, however, happens when that map shifts. When organized criminal groups fight each other for control of an area, the resulting violence spills out into the community. These territory shifts and subsequent violence can happen in any part of a city. There is no news source that reports on what groups control what areas and what is in flux. No one publishes this map. Sometimes residents just know it, because they’re on the ground and it’s the reality. Most often, however, everyone is taken by surprise.

This combination of known and dynamic factors, opportunistic and organized crime, make understanding the crime landscape of a new city a real challenge. When you throw in violence against journalists, censored media, low trust in authorities, and chronic underreporting, it’s no easy feat to even understand what’s going on. At Base Operations, that’s exactly what we’re trying to do.

The Base Operations Manifesto

The Base Operations Team

At Base Operations, we believe in making security transparent.

Our product helps people in cities with high crime rates and poor access to information. We offer an alternative to the current practice of relying on underreported government data, media censored by violence, and anecdotal evidence shared through informal networks. With Base Operations, users can view data aggregated from a variety of sources and visualized with the latest technology. They receive real time alerts with actionable information, analyze trends, and safely navigate complex environments, all from their phones.

We believe citizens should be informed, not sheltered. Prepared, not frightened. And empowered, not ignored. We are Base Operations, and this is our manifesto.

Transparency. The lack of crime trend data in countries such as Mexico causes real harm. We are not just talking about muggings that tend to proliferate when people lack economic opportunity. We are talking about kidnapping, extortion, assaults, sexual violence, and even murder, frequently perpetuated by organized criminal groups. Seeing the reality of the situation may be painful, but we cannot change the future if we stay blind to the present.

Technology. Let’s use technology to do good. Data mining, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are powerful tools. They can be used for more than telling people what product to buy next. We believe in putting technology front and center in solving the world’s most entrenched problems.

Actionability. Information is powerful but action saves lives. We go beyond just informing our users. We provide them with actionable next steps. From offering a platform to report crimes to proposing alternative routes, we support our users in their day to day lives.

Accountability. For us, citizens come first. There are myriad approaches to catalyzing change. We believe in supporting citizens directly, not working through institutions or governments. Empowering citizens is our bottom-up approach to improving standards of living across the world. We believe that change stems from informed, prepared, and empowered citizens.